Strangeness of agreement Does this resemble the common linguistic understanding of the term “agreement”?

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Agreement as formal control “There is a strong intuition, captured in the controller-target terminology, that agreement is asymmetric” (Corbett 2006: 115) Psycholinguistics: inflectional or control theory of agreement

Formal control agreement is derivative from parallel agreement ”Den Ausgangspunkt für die Entstehung der Kongruenz haben solche Fälle gebildet, in denen die formelle Übereinstimmung eines Wortes mit einem andern nicht durch Rücksichtnahme auf dasselbe herbeigeführt, sondern nur durch die Gleichheit der Beziehung bedingt ist.” “The starting-point for the origin of concord was afforded by cases in which the formal correspondence of a word with another was produced not by any regard for the latter, but merely by the identity of their relation.”

Formal control-style understanding of agreement Formal control-style understanding dominates in modern linguistics and psycholinguistics This has a consequence: desire to narrow down the notion of agreement Kibrik 2011 – narrow, syntactic understanding of agreement In the domain of argument-predicate agreement, primarily the Germanic pattern, most remote from discourse reference However, in the context of this workshop I allow a broader, discourse-oriented understanding of the term “agreement” In order to do that we will need to lift the formal-control requirement towards agreement

Reduced reference and agreement In the broadest understanding of both, the extent of the included phenomena may almost coincide There are some unusual agreement features (see Corbett 2006 on tense agreement, also cf. Paul 1880), but let us focus on major features But the notions still remain distinct Reduced reference is a functional notion: the process of rendering activated referents in discourse Agreement is a linguist’s observation about the covariance of discourse constituents

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Reference: the process of mentioning mental entities (referents) in discourse by means of referential expressions The Victorian house that Ms. Johnson is inspecting has been deemed unsafe by town officials. But she asks a workman toting the bricks from the lawn to give her a boost through an open first-floor window. Once inside, she spends nearly four hours Ø measuring and diagramming each room in the 80-year-old house, Ø gathering enough information to Ø estimate what it would cost to rebuild it. She snaps photos of the buckled floors and the plaster that has fallen away from the walls.

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Referential choice Activation in working memory => reduced referential device. Else use a full device E.g. if the referent ‘Ms. Johnson’ is highly activated, use a pronoun How are different referential expressions, such as the eight mentions of ‘Ms. Johnson’, related to each other? Clearly no formal control (different syntactic domains) One can speak about agreement between them (in person, number, gender), but such agreement is clearly an epiphenomenon of the individual mappings “referent referential expression” referential expressions just happen to be in agreement or concord with each other

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Syntactic anaphora? Reference and referential choice are fundamentally discourse-based, cognitively-driven processes Is there something like syntactic anaphora? A mother and her child NP I gave John his ticket Clause I promised John to give him his ticket Closely connected clauses To account for such syntactic usages, one can still employ a full-scale cognitively based explanation But it may be sometimes more economical to account for syntactic usages with the help of simple and automatic rules Including in terms of formal control from the antecedent Antecedent functions as a placeholder, formal representative of the usual cognitive controller Syntactic anaphora is grammaticalization or routinization of the more general process of discourse-based reduced reference

Polypersonal broader agreement (Navajo) wónáásóó shį į bimá hadah ha-b-í-ˀ-ch’-íí-yil finally Ptcl his.mother down up.out-3.Obl-against- Pref-4.Nom-Pfv-push ‘Finally, it appears, his mother pushed him out (of the nest)’ ts’ídá shį į naˀahóóhai b-a-ˀ-í-ltsood just Ptcl chicken 3.Obl-to-Indef.Acc-Pfv-were.fed ‘Probably at that time the chickens were fed’ (lit. ‘ something was fed to the chickens’) The more a language has of broad agreement, the less that looks like narrow agreement

Disagreement But even in the narrow agreement there are multiple difficulties and mismatches Because of parallel, independent mapping from the cognitive structure? Errors (?) In a conversational corpus I says occurs up to 50% of the time (Biber et al. 1999: 191) Attraction or proximity effect the key to the cabinets were missing (Bock and Middleton 2011) “Committee contexts”

First and second person problem Even hard-core syntacticians usually do not consider 1, 2 person reference a case of anaphora (formal control from the antecedent) John lost his wallet ANAPHORA I lost my wallet DEIXIS John lost my wallet DEIXIS Are we more inclined to see agreement in Germanic 1, 2 person verbal inflection? Ich sprech-e AGREEMENT OR DEIXIS? Could this be an intuitive borderline between “reference as such” and “agreement as such”? Each pronominal element is produced independently

Conclusions In terms of the extent of relevant evidence, broadly understood agreement is close to broadly understood reduced reference The broad understanding of agreement makes us lift the formal control view Manifestation of referential features in discourse is controlled by the cognitive structure: mapping Observed identity of features on constituents is a result of this cognitive mapping: parallel agreement

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Conclusions Syntactic (narrow) agreement, compatible with the formal control view, is grammaticalization of the more general discourse-cognitive process The tighter the constituent, the more likely is such grammaticalization, and this explains the Agreement Hierarchy Frequent mismatches can be explained by independent mapping onto different constituents These mismatches and difficulties betray the derivative character of agreement Agreement phenomena are a periphery of the underlying process of discourse reference